With our forest fast diminishing, timber supply is getting scarce and inconsistent in grade. This makes the cost of timber as a building material prohibitively high. Over the years, building contractors and developers have been forced to look for alternative materials to reduce the cost of building construction. Many approaches have been proposed in the past to utilize light weight building material made from metal for structural works such as roof trusses or the likes, however until the present invention, the results have not been very encouraging. In many prior art practices, the truss members are formed from a U-shape section of a metal sheet. In one example, the ends of the legs of the U-section are tightly folded back to form a thick double edge. The top chords in prior art practices are formed of inverted U-shaped sections having flanges projecting
One of the major difficulties with many of the prior art practices to manufacturing of metal roof trusses is that different components are used for bottom chords and the top chords resulting in two different fabrication lines or at least two different set ups for fabrication lines are required. Furthermore, two different stock items must be maintained in inventory. In addition, because of the flanges of the top chord members, it is necessary to provide for cutting the flanges off at least one of the top chords at the apex of the truss.
Due to the unfriendly U-shaped of the building material, handling and working with the building material is rather difficult adding unnecessary cost to the construction. Strength and rigidity of the building material are also suspect. The present invention attempts to solve at least partially if not completely these problems.